Becoming of age

The east wind is up early, but even as it picks up speed, there’s a sense of peace. A bird is calling in the forest. Otherwise, it’s quiet. You can’t even hear the sound of the sea from the vegetable garden. The calm soaks through me, and it strikes me that it’s so far removed from the furore raging in my country. I feel slightly sick.

The old visible in the new

South Africans lived through 48 years of a nightmare in which we were forced by law to centre our existence on racism. By far the most of us never want to go back to that ugly place. But it’s like an infected wound, and it festers.

This time, it has taken an artwork to bring the issues to the fore: not only racism, but also freedom of expression and the deep layers of hurt that still exist. I won’t repeat the saga of the painting dubbed The Spear here, but there are plenty of excellent pieces written about it (try here and here for some of the best). 

The sadness of it all weighs on me – cry, the beloved country, indeed – and I am inclined to lose myself in a corner of my garden. Then the phone rings. It is Kathy: her son, Daniel, is visiting from Cape Town and is ready to make good on my request to “fix” my 29-year-old sailor’s tattoo. Today, if I want. I want.

Meaning

Daniel, you see, is a tattoo artist who is not only outstanding at his art, but also pretty good at reading people. So he recognises that the funny little blue swallow on my arm has meaning for me. 

The artist at work

On a hot February day in Durban, my dear Swiss friend Marcel and I wandered into a tattoo parlour off Grey Street. I chose a swallow for my left arm; he chose a butterfly for his right. An old man with shaky hands did Marcel’s tattoo, wiped his needle on an old rag and then plunged it into me.

That was in 1983, and tattoos were about as anti-mainstream as you could get. The bird, for me, was about freedom and it was a way of saying “screw you” to a mainstream society where apartheid ruled.

Mainstream

Since then, of course, apartheid has gone and tattoos have moved into the mainstream as an art form where cleanliness is supreme. Take Daniel: he’s one of the beautiful people and the intricate tattoos that cover most of his body are true works of arts.

He studies my arm, thinks a while, and produces an image that is perfect for me: a cluster of colourful flowers swirling around the relined swallow. With the help of some wine, Kathy and Bryony’s company, and Daniel’s care, I sit through the hour and a half that it takes. It’s painful, but less so than the pain I experienced in the 15 minutes or so that it took the old man to put the original tattoo on my arm.

More complex

My swallow – my old thumbs-up to freedom – is still there. It’s a lot prettier and somewhat more complex now, as so much good art is. It was only partly a joke when I told a friend that my swallow was growing up.

It makes me think again of the rainbow nation that our beloved Desmond Tutu spoke about: it’s still there and it’s growing up. And growth is seldom painless. We continue finding ways to deal with the hurts and to conquer racism, and sometimes we do it loudly and in chaos. But we do it, and we will do it. We know that we have to. It’s who we are; it’s where we live.

PS: You should be able to view Daniel’s Facebook profile here.